Healthy Lifestyles for Bipolar Disorder

We all want to enjoy good health and well-being. Making healthy choices in daily life can promote feelings of self-efficacy and accomplishment. Indeed, these days, most people are encouraged to think about how to build good sleep, exercise and eating into their daily life. The media is filled with tips and suggestions about how we can pursue these goals. A growing body of work suggests that food is a powerful way to take care of our bodies and our minds.

Tools for promoting good physical health may be particularly helpful for those with bipolar disorder. Many people with bipolar disorder experience physical health challenges. When those health problems are present, there is a risk of more mood symptoms. In addition to medication, changes to sleep hygiene, exercise, and eating are often recommended to people with bipolar disorder to support overall balance and health. Diet has been shown to provide powerful protection against these health problems.

Can overall health and well-being be improved by following a healthy lifestyle? To test this idea, we are testing two healthy food plans as additions to medication: the Mediterranean Diet and time-restricted eating.

We are recruiting for the largest study ever conducted on how dietary interventions, when added to medication, might help people with bipolar disorder improve their health and mood stability.

As with all good intentions, it can feel overwhelming to think about where to start with adjustments to routine. A key part of our study is that we work with people to think about how to make these changes in small, feasible steps.

This study will compare the benefits of two approaches to eating: Mediterranean and Time-Restricted Eating (TRE), described below. Neither food plan is meant to be a diet or a treatment. In this study, we ask you to consume the same amount of food that you normally would and to continue your regular medical care for bipolar disorder. We would assign you to one of these food plans, and send you tips on how to follow the plan, materials to help understand the benefits, and ideas about how to cope with the challenges of making these types of lifestyle changes.

Our goal is to understand not only if the intervention helps, but also a very broad range of the ways in which it may help, including when it helps and when it does not help. We’re looking for people who will help us understand this important set of goals, by sharing their experiences with us through a broad range of questions as they try on one of our dietary interventions. This study will involve many different questions because we sincerely want to deeply understand each person’s experience during this study.

Those who take part in the study will be paid at a rate of $25/hour for their time completing assessments.

You can take part in this study from the US, Canada, India, Australia or the UK, as we offer the program online over the internet and with video calls.

Time-Restricted Eating and Bipolar Disorder

Time restricted eating involves restricting eating to 10 hours per day, about 4 hours less than is typical for most people. To make that happen, people typically avoid eating in the first hour after they wake up and avoid eating in the couple hours before they go to sleep. To do this, you’d need a standard schedule that works well for you, and we’d work with you to determine that window. TRE has been shown to improve sleep and circadian rhythms, and we would like to understand if it similarly has this benefit in symptoms of bipolar disorder.

The Mediterranean Diet and Bipolar Disorder

The Mediterranean Diet is one of the best studied ways to eat healthfully. It is based on the typical diet in the 16 countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, and it involves eating more fruit, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, and using olive oil in place of less healthy fats. You can adapt the diet to use your preferred flavors and spices, so that you can still enjoy flavors from different parts of the world. This diet has shown to be significantly beneficial for people with heart disease, diabetes, and a number of other health conditions. We would like to understand if the Mediterranean Diet also has benefits for symptoms of bipolar disorder.

We sincerely hope you’ll be interested in working with us.

In this study, you would be asked to log your regular eating habits for 2 weeks, while we share tips about healthy sleep and goal-setting with you. Then, we would assign you to follow either Time-Restricted Eating or the Mediterranean Diet. At this point, we would share initial instructions and tips to follow your food plan, and you would continue to receive more tips about healthy eating and sleep throughout the 8 weeks of following the plan. Throughout this time, we’d have you log your food daily, to see how the food plans work for you. Multiple times throughout the study, we’d also ask you to take paid surveys and interviews so we can track how things are going.

If you are interested in participating in this study, please fill out the following survey:

Healthy Lifestyles for Bipolar Disorder Screening Survey

Note: This survey may take up to 45 minutes to complete. If you would like to be emailed a link of this survey to complete at a later time, please enter your email here.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at calmprogram@berkeley.edu.

About the CALM Program

The CALM Program at UC Berkeley focuses on understanding the factors that promote better outcomes in bipolar disorder, and how to use those to develop new interventions.

The CALM Program is led by Sheri L. Johnson, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and CREST.BD network member.